Posts Tagged ‘Internet Marketing’

Each new year brings new challenges in the world of online marketing. Things move at a rapid pace and it’s not always easy to keep up with all the tools and all the rules!

In the coming year, there are a few trends that many experts are expecting:

Mobile is not going away. In fact, if you’re not mobile ready and mobile optimised you will likely start losing out. More of your customers than ever are using mobile devices and the trend is leaning toward mobile search taking over ordinary web searches. It’s vital that businesses have a mobile marketing strategy going forward. Beyond simply advertising and creating a site that looks good on a smartphone screen, you’ll want to work to engage and build relationships with your customers via mobile marketing. This can include apps, social media, and highly personalised experiences when people arrive on your site. Reward customers for their loyalty, too. They want value for their money.

Inbound marketing is another area that is expected to continue to grow by leaps and bounds. Optimising your website alone isn’t enough anymore. Content marketing through videos, blogs, articles, guest posts, and other areas can help you educate and inform interested prospects and then drive those prospects into a sales funnel where you can build a rapport and trust with them. If you aren’t working on inbound marketing already, you should seriously consider it for 2013. How can people who search for the thing you specialise in find you? How can you help them find what they are looking for and position your company as the answer to their query? Beyond articles, companies should look at other visually appealing methods like infographics and videos and leverage the many social marketing tools that are available to use.

Information will be more important to monitor than ever. Beyond knowing how people arrive on your website you’ll want to watch closely to see what they do when they do arrive. Optimising your conversion rate is vital for search engine optimisation. If Google et all see a high bounce rate they will re-index in search of a page more appealing to users. Paying attention to detailed analytics will pay off.

What’s your strategy for 2013?

It may change throughout the year. Keep a close eye on your customers, your competition, your online reputation, social media, and your analytics to help you drive growth and adapt to changes quickly.

If you get the total number of web pages on the net it might be more than even the people who live in this world now. So how do you prevent your site from getting lost in the crowd? Search engine marketing (SEM) is one factor that can help you here. Competition is huge. In this scenario, if you are really serious about your online business or your website from which you expect really good business, you need to have a good idea of search engine marketing and its advantages.

The growth of internet marketing is now faster than the growth of traditional marketing. Lots of companies now give serious thoughts about search engine marketing due to its ability to bring good returns of investment. SEM has a fantastic potential for:

Increasing sales

Creating brand awareness

Providing website visibility

Search engine marketing can be done in different ways. The most well-known and well-accepted techniques of SEM are search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC).

Search engine optimisation

As we all know, SEO is all about creating and enhancing your website in such a way that it is easily found by search engines and are brought to the front pages, facilitating quick and easy viewability for human visitors who are the potential customers. Here the marketing is virtually free as you pay no amount to the search engines for displaying your website, be it in the front pages or back. The catch here, as you would know, is the time it takes to reach the front and the constant efforts you need to put forth to retain the high position.

Pay per Click

Pay per Click or paid search brings your website under the viewability span of the search engines very fast. It is taken up as the primary option of SEM by more and more companies recently. Its advantage is that it catches attention very fast. By bidding for the keyword that you think your prospective customers would use to reach your site you come to the front pages of the chosen search engine and is easily and quickly noticed by readers. It is expensive but brings quick results.

If you think that just by bringing the website into the users’ and search engines’ notice your job is done, you cannot be more wrong. Because, search engine marketing is not only about increasing the traffic to your site but about increasing the right traffic. What you need is not readers of your site but buyers of your products. Which brings us to the end of this post and the most important point that should remain in your head: People pay not to see your website but to get a good product or service. Hence provide what they pay for and your website about it will automatically turn out effective.

Well, yes. That is, if you own a business and are searching for ways to promote it free. And if you have a limited budget. Surprised? Wait till you hear more. Gone are the days when you pay a fortune to bring your business on a remote corner of a news paper or make it appear for 10 seconds on television. With the World Wide Web becoming a global entity you have innumerable opportunities to spread the word about your business without paying even a penny. Let’s check out a few such ways in which you can do free marketing for your business.

Integrated with Google Maps, Google Local brings your site in its local listings catering to the highly potential local customers. All it takes is entering your business name, address and phone number in Google’s Local Business Center and confirming the details with a phone call. Once that’s done, you are all set to go.

Google coupon

Coupons can attract more visitors as well as make the old ones stick to you. Google coupons is another service from Google that lets you advertise your website without any charges.

Yahoo! Local

Yahoo! Local organises websites by location and category. It provides both listing and reviews. It is worth adding your website as it provides reviews. As you know, higher reviews can bring higher ratings.

Yellow Pages

Yellow pages is a phrase that has become a synonym for a business listing due to long-term usage. For that same reason yellow pages.com is one site that can bring a wide popularity for your website.

People’s Guide

Comparatively a new website, People’s Guide is a simple way to get a business listing for free. It has a wide category list making your website even easier to be viewed. It also has a city listing of more than 100 countries.

Windows Live

This local listing service is from Microsoft, as you would have guessed. Windows Live Local Listing Center lets you list your business information in Live search and Virtual Earth.

Squidoo

Squidoo brings you the twin advantage of creating a budget website as well as advertise it. Squidoo has a special tool that enables you to build a website on your own. Moreover, it also helps you bring in a share of the ad revenue.

Adding content like articles and blogs

Yet another free way of promoting your site is to submit articles about your product in different article directories. However, here you need to make sure that the content you add is informative and relevant. Similar is the case of blogs. A blog can provide information and updates of your business.

There are different sites where you can submit press releases for free on anything newsworthy about your business like the launching of a new product or organising an event.

eBay.com

Not exactly free. Agreed. But the current shopping hub of millions of users all over the world, eBay.com is a great way of letting the Internet shoppers know of your business.

The list doesn’t end here. There are even more websites that let you add your business information for free. While paying for the marketing ensures quality returns these free techniques are always worth the effort as you lose no money but gain at least a few customers without fail.